Word: catcher
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...Salinger may have hated visitors, but he sure loved lawyers. The famously reclusive author fended off all attempts by others to adapt his writings, particularly his masterwork, Catcher in the Rye. He even said "no" to Steven Spielberg regarding a film version of his classic novel. But now that the elusive Salinger is gone, what will happen to his iron-fisted control over his writings...
Salinger's only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in 1951 and gradually achieved a status that made him cringe. For decades the book was a universal rite of passage for adolescents, the manifesto of disenchanted youth. (Sometimes lethally disenchanted: After he killed John Lennon in 1980, Mark David Chapman said he had done it to promote the reading of Salinger's book. A few months later, when he headed out to shoot President Ronald Reagan, John Hinckley Jr. left behind a copy of the book in his hotel room.) But what matters is that even...
...poured his resentment into a tirade against Hollywood that Holden Caulfield delivers in The Catcher in the Rye. A few critics objected to Caulfield's free use of fairly innocuous curse words, but most of the reviews were exultant. Catcher stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, then developed its enduring afterlife. But Salinger had long since moved on from concerns with adolescent dissatisfaction to an interest in Eastern religion, especially the Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th century Hindu mystic. His beliefs started to find their way into his fiction. In his haunting story...
...Salinger published Franny and Zooey as a single volume. It stayed at the top of the best-seller list for six months. By that time, the cult status of The Catcher in the Rye was fully established. But in some important corners of American letters, there was a backlash forming. In reviews that were on the whole positive, John Updike still found Salinger sentimental, and Alfred Kazin thought he was getting "cute." For years John Cheever told friends that he thought Salinger wouldn't let Hollywood make a movie version of Catcher because Salinger was too old to play Holden...
...very least, the 24-year-old Wilhite should be on a ventilator and in a wheelchair. Instead, only six months after the accident - which took the lives of Adenhart, Henry Pearson and Courtney Stewart - Wilhite walks, talks, lifts weights, jogs - and smiles. A catcher on the Cal State Fullerton teams that won the Division 1A College World Series in 2004 and reached the finals in 2006 and '07, Wilhite would like to play in the alumni game next year. Indeed, on Aug. 29, he threw out the first pitch at the Angels-Athletics game. Once...